Adrian Sutton was born in Kent, in 1967, then spent his youth in both Zimbabwe and South Africa before returning to study music at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. In his early career he created works for both studio and concert stage, and this twin focus has characterised his output since.

After a brief spell writing for television, Sutton quickly found his métier composing for theatre, collaborating with London’s National Theatre in a number of hugely popular productions such as War Horse (2007) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012), which saw him jointly win the Olivier Award for Best Sound Design.

He has always had an affinity for the twentieth-century British orchestral sound, Walton’s music being one of his first loves. The rhythmic vitality of Walton’s scores pervades much of Sutton’s writing, as do their angular harmonies. There are elements of Bax and Finzi, too, when Sutton is in a more pastoral mode, particularly in the lyricism of his melodic lines and the contrapuntal interest of his string textures. His music is rarely without flow and incident, displaying mercurial shifts in mood and harmony. A Sutton score is always dramatic in the broadest sense, whether written for stage or not.